One of the most bizarre moments in the Bechtel highway contract briefing that was organized by the Government yesterday was when one of the managers running the contract came up with an estimate of a death of a commuter.

Darko Spirovski, representative of the controversial IRD consortium that was hired to conduct oversight over the Bechtel contract, urged that the building of the new highways is necessary to reduce traffic fatalities, and supported this by saying that the death of one commuter costs the country a million EUR. Journalists eventually asked him to stop making this comparison to justify the controversial 1.3 billion EUR deal because they found it tasteless.